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YOUR participation will send an undeniable message to Christy Clark’s BC Liberal government that they MUST act during the next 18 months before a BC election to protect British Columbia’s ancient forests and ensure sustainable forestry jobs!

Date:          Thursday, October 20, 2011
Time:          7:00-8:30 pm
Location:     Alix Goolden Hall, 907 Pandora St., Victoria

Join a diverse range of speakers on the need to protect British Columbia’s ancient forests and ensure sustainable forestry jobs.

Speakers include:

Ken Wu & TJ Watt– Ancient Forest Alliance co-founders

Robert Morales – Hul’qumi’num Chief Treaty Negotiator

Gisele Martin – Tlaoquiaht cultural educator and tourism operator

Judith Sayers – Hupacasath member and UVic adjunct professor

Jens Wieting – Sierra Club of BC campaigner

Arnold Bercov – Pulp, Paper, and Woodworkers of Canada president (local 8)

Annette Tanner – WCWC Mid-Island Chair

British Columbia’s old-growth forests are highly endangered by industrial logging, with tens of thousands of hectares being clearcut each year. See “before” and “after” maps of Vancouver Island at:
https://ancientforestalliance.org/ancient-forests/before-after-old-growth-maps/

The decline in coastal forestry employment has been fundamentally driven in recent decades by the depletion of the biggest, best old-growth stands in the valley bottoms and lower elevations, resulting in diminishing returns as trees get smaller and more expensive to reach.

Meanwhile the BC government has done nothing to ensure that forest companies retool coastal sawmills to handle smaller second-growth logs, let alone invest in value-added manufacturing facilities. Instead, while mills close, the BC government has been allowing a mass exodus of raw logs to leave for foreign mills – including over 1.1 million cubic meters of raw logs to China last year despite earlier assurances that “lumber, not logs” would be exported.

The unsustainable depletion of old-growth forests has not only resulted in the loss of forestry jobs, but also increasing numbers of endangered species, collapsing wild salmon stocks, the massive release of carbon into the atmosphere, and the steady erosion of many First Nations cultures which evolved in and are supported by old-growth forests.

Support the call for protection of old-growth forests, sustainable second-growth forestry, an end to raw log exports, and the implementation of First Nations land use plans.

YOUR participation is VITAL!

Please forward far and wide!
Also please confirm how many people you’re bringing to help us get a sense of our numbers by emailing us at info@ancientforestalliance.org

Or visit our Facebook Event page and click attend:
https://www.facebook.com/#!/event.php?eid=288068437869909

For more info contact: info@ancientforestalliance.org

*** NOTE: If you haven’t recently, PLEASE WRITE a LETTER to the BC government and your local BC Liberal or NDP Member of the Legislative Assembly (MLA) calling on the BC government to devise a plan to:

– Immediately protect BC’s most endangered forests, such as valley bottom ancient rainforests like the Avatar Grove, our Coastal Douglas fir forests, and Inland Old-Growth Rainforests.
-Undertake a comprehensive Provincial Old-Growth Strategy that will inventory and ban and quickly phase-out logging of endangered old-growth forests through the province.
– Ensure the sustainable logging of second-growth forests.
– Ban the export of raw logs to foreign mills.
– Implement new land use plans to expand protected areas based on First Nations land use plans, conservation biology-based scientific assessments, and climate change mitigation strategies.

Write to:
Premier Christy Clark (premier@gov.bc.ca)
Steve Thomson, Minister of Forests, Lands and Natural Resource Operations (for.minister@gov.bc.ca)

Find your local MLA’s address at [Original article no longer available]

Or use our online Letter-Writing Form at:
https://ancientforestalliance.org/write-letter.php

And please sign and forward our online petition at: ancientforestalliance.org/ways-to-take-action-for-forests/petition/